Allocating Rail Capacity through Socioeconomic and Environmental Criteria

Abstract

On railway lines with scarce infrastructure capacity, allocation methods allow for the assessment of the capacity requests from railway undertakings. The European Commission introduced a regulation to ensure a uniform approach to capacity allocation across all member states through socioeconomic and environmental criteria. However, relevant experiences and methods related to such criteria are hard to come by across Europe, meaning that such criteria' impact on capacity allocation is unknown. In this paper, we provide a method that applies the European criteria and can give insight into the possible impact of this new way of allocating capacity. The railway line Deventer – Bad Bentheim case study allows for the application of the method and defines its possible impacts. Compared to the current Dutch approach of distributing capacity scarcity, open-access train services have higher chances of receiving capacity access. The result shows how railway undertakings will behave more beneficially to society during capacity allocation procedures following the implementation of the method. Recommendations to improve the method are to reduce the number of assumptions, provide an inflation correction across all monetary parameters and consider using minimal frequencies.